In his heart he wished them luck – or a swift death.

There were a dozen of them only, half of their kinden’s unwilling contingent currently serving with the Wasp Fourth Army. As tall as two men, as broad as three, sporting massive slabs of metal armour and thick sheets of studded leather that would crush a normal warrior, they bore great spade-headed spears and seven-foot shields of metal and wood. They now moved with five-foot strides towards the walls of Tark. Mole Cricket-kinden they were and, like the other Auxillians, they were slaves whose families were held hostage to their loyal service. Few and reclusive, to them it seemed that they had always been slaves to someone or other. They had laboured and built for the Moth-kinden and Spiders when the world was younger and the revolution still a dream, but at least their masters had known where their true skills lay. Now the Wasp-kinden had garrisoned their towns and their mines, and turned them into warriors.

There was some shot coming from the city walls now and they put their shields up, feeling the metal shudder as crossbow bolts bounced from them. Their kind were onyx-skinned and pale-haired, huge and strong, but, though they were armoured like automotives, a keen shot with a crossbow could finish them, just like any mortal man.

But their present enemies were creatures of the surface and the sun, while the Mole Crickets saw better at night than in daylight. They were closing on the walls.

Their leader glanced left, seeing old Czerig with the ram and that the gates were almost broken through. No doubt it was important to the Wasps that all these holes be made in one go. He had no wish to learn strategy himself.

A fistful of grenades suddenly landed all around them, dropped from an orthopter already burning, even as it passed overhead. An instant volley of explosions erupted about them, killing three and wounding another, denting and splitting shields. The remainder picked up their pace. Their orders were to go through the wall, they knew, and then through the men beyond.

None of them would survive. So much seemed certain. The Mole Cricket leader braced himself as the great stones loomed before him.

Pardon this violence, he said silently, dropping his spear and shield. His great chisel-nailed hands found the gaps between the stones, and he called upon his ancestors, called upon the Art they had given him. The stones within his grasp – and those his brothers grasped – began to soften and to shift.

Totho found himself crouching against some of the fallen wall, frantically slotting another magazine in place and knowing he was almost out of ammunition. Skrill was behind him, her back to his, sending sporadic arrows up at the enemy. More and more Ants were coming to help hold the breach, and even Totho could see how the attacking force was being made to give ground, every inch of it bought in blood. Above them the cavalry had arrived, Ant-kinden soldiers riding great winged insects, cumbersome in flight as they buzzed ponderously through the darting Wasp airborne. Each flying beast had a big repeating crossbow mounted above its thorax and soon the newcomers were taking a savage toll of the enemy.

Knowing that Salma was up there somewhere, Totho just hoped he would be safe, but he could spare him no further thought.

Yet more Ant-kinden were coming to join the defence. Some had brought packs of giant ants under leash, drawn from the nest of tunnels beneath the city. The creatures were the guards and soldiers of the nest below, and another resource the city could barely spare, but they had stings and jagged mandibles. As soon as they were within sight of the enemy their leashes were loosed, and they scuttled towards the foe with jaws gaping in idiot threat.

Totho tried to track another Wasp soldier while the man darted overhead, hands spitting golden fire. Then one of the Wasp heliopters rumbled past, and Totho noticed it was failing, one of its rotors torn and still. The ponderous, blocky machine limped through the air, tilting and tilting further. One of the great flying insects was clinging to its side, riderless, peeling at the metal casing with its jaws. Then it went out of sight over the rooftops, but Totho felt it come down, felt the ground shake and heard the sudden blast as its engine ruptured and its fuel exploded. Looking over the rooftops he saw the night was punctuated by a dozen red gleams where Tark was burning.

There was a sudden sense of movement around him, Ants pushing into him, wordless but eyes wide as some unheard alarm went through their heads.

A bright light, a sound – he was lifted up by a great hand. He heard Skrill scream and then… and then… Nothing.

Totho’s head was ringing, and he did not know why. He was aware of lying on some uneven surface and there seemed to be a great deal of noise and confusion going on. He sat up, clutching his head, and then saw what he was lying on.

Bodies.

He was lying on corpses, dead Ant-kinden from Tark, dead Wasp-kinden from the Empire. He stumbled to his feet, fell over almost immediately. His artificer’s coat was bloody and ragged, and he picked a metal shard from it curiously. All around him a lot of people were rushing back and forth, but he felt it was his duty as an artificer to identify the piece of metal he had found.

It looked like the sort of fragment that would be left behind by an exploding grenade, he thought. A crude ball-type grenade, not one of the hatched-metal ones the Beetles made in Helleron.

Awareness ran through him like a swordblade: Tark; the siege; the night attack. It was still going on. He must have been knocked flat by an explosion.

‘Skrill?’ he shouted, remembering how she had been there with him. ‘Skrill?’ but there was absolutely no chance of being heard. Even his own voice sounded muted and far away. Another thirty or forty Ant soldiers went charging past, trampling their own dead. Some stopped to shoot upwards, and he fell to his knees once again, looking into that asylum sky full of fighting men, beasts and machines.

Hands found him and helped him to his feet. He leant back into them, feeling shaken and sick, the impact of the grenade still thundering in his head.

‘Che!’ he got out. ‘You found me.’

‘You better get your head on straight!’ And Che turned into Skrill, her voice high with fear. ‘Where’s your piece?’

He looked around, but Scuto’s marvellous crossbow was now nowhere to be seen. He plucked another – a Tarkesh soldier’s – from its dead owner’s hand, dragging a quiver off a second body.

They had moved further from the breach, he saw, but the gate itself was now open. Or rather there were splintered pieces of it left barely clinging to the hinges. There was the great engine there that had powered through the gateway before it had finally been stopped and disabled. Ants and Wasps were fighting there. Totho stumbled towards the machine.

‘Where’re you going?’ Skrill shouted after him. She had lost her bow, he noticed. She should find herself a crossbow as he had, but of course she surely derived from some primitive old race that didn’t know about crossbows and how clever they were.

The ramming engine was partly blocking the gateway. Wasp spearmen were trying to push through, but the Ants were holding them back. The engine itself looked really interesting, though, and that seemed the most important thing to Totho’s addled mind. As the Ants swarmed around it, he struggled to make his way to its battered head. It had not been intended for this use, he now saw. Some brilliant hand had cunningly reshaped it.

There was a litter of bodies about it, mostly Wasp-kinden. Some were still moving, and he eyed them dully. The engine was slewed a little on its side, and he saw corpses in Wasp colours scattered there, but not actually Wasps. Artificers? Of course they were the machine’s artificers. The Wasps themselves had no respect for such skills.